How people choose 'career paths'

STANFORD -- When John Krumboltz was 10 years old, he wanted to be a
doctor.

Then, during a neighborhood accident, he witnessed a compound fracture.

"I immediately suffered an attack of nausea that forced me to leave the
scene," Krumboltz said. "Thinking about it later, I arrived at a self-evident
truth: I could never become a physician. I imagined a scenario where I am in
my examining room, a patient is brought in with a broken bone, and I proceed
to vomit all over the patient.

"It was so obvious to me that this would preclude me from a career in
medicine that I never discussed it with anyone."

Krumboltz had jumped to the wrong conclusion. However, the incident did
more than discourage him from a career in medicine; it was the beginning of
his lifelong investigation into just how people choose their career paths --
or whether they "choose" them at all.

Now a Stanford University professor of education, Krumboltz is a former
Guggenheim Fellow and the current holder of the Leona Tyler Award of the
American Psychological Association -- the nation's foremost award in the
field of counseling psychology.

Krumboltz has identified hundreds of self-defeating beliefs, among them:

"If I can't have the best, I don't want anything at all."

"If I don't make more money than my father, I'll consider myself a
failure in life."

"If I fail, I feel better knowing that I had not tried very hard."

"If I only could do this, then I would be happy."

His own childhood yearning for a medical career, Krumboltz says, was
guided by several false beliefs: that nausea at the sight of blood is a
permanent affliction that cannot be overcome, that no one who has this
affliction can become a doctor, and that the evidence is so compelling that
no discussion is warranted.

He learned, much later, that this squeamishness is a temporary response
that can be overcome rather easily, that many physicians have had to overcome
it, and, most important, that talking about assumptions is a good way to test
whether they are true.

One student in a 1987 study by Krumboltz and colleague Lynda Mitchell was
convinced his parents would disown him if he majored in sociology and not
engineering. For two years, the student had avoided declaring a major.

"First, the counselor worked with him to examine the evidence that his
parents would disown him if he were to major in sociology, and second, to
consider whether life would really be unbearable if they did," Krumboltz
said.

The student's assignments included discussing his feelings honestly with
his parents. He discovered that his parents had been promoting an engineering
major because they thought they were supporting his wishes. As a result of
these discussions, he declared a sociology major.

A decision they 'never knew they made'

According to Krumboltz, however, the biggest mistaken assumption is one
held by society at large: the assumption that career decisions happen
"naturally."

Many young people never make a career decision, Krumboltz said, they
simply follow a path of least resistance. Summer jobs become permanent ones;
family or friends pressure young people toward options that avoid temporary
unemployment.

"This is a big problem in society -- and it's overlooked and
unrecognized," he said. "Here is a decision that affects everything in our
future -- not just how we spend eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year -- but
probably who we're going to marry, the neighborhood in which we live, who our
friends are going to be, and how much money we have to spend.

"A decision with such profound consequences deserves careful study. How
much time do young people spend planning it and considering options? Many
give more thought to choosing a new pair of shoes. For many people, it's a
decision they never knew they made -- it was made by default."

Society's inattention is largely to blame, Krumboltz said.

"Most schools, for example, don't have a course on life planning," he
said. "If kids spent as much school time on planning their futures as they do
calculating the length of a hypotenuse, they could avoid many unwise career
choices. For many, there is no mechanism for career planning. It's a
spare-time activity.

"Helping people figure out what use to make of their precious lives is a
crucial task. People's sense of personal worth and their motivation to
achieve depend on finding a direction that makes sense to them."

The situation may be exacerbated by the "widening gap" between the
adolescent and adult worlds, he said.

"How many children imagine they will become educational researchers -- or
insurance claims investigators?" Krumboltz asked.

"Additionally, children can seldom see what parents do when the parents
commute to work or have jobs that are hard to observe (such as the paperwork
jobs of many white-collar workers) or off-limits to children (such as
industrial plants)."

Also, he adds, the decision-making process has been complicated by the
increasing desire for high-prestige jobs: doctor, lawyer, professor.

"When I meet people outside of Stanford, they often look up to me simply
because I'm a Stanford professor," Krumboltz said. They don't know how well I
do my job. People are judged on their membership in an occupation -- not on
how well the job is done. I took my car to a mechanic yesterday -- gosh, he's
a talented guy! He gets my highest prestige rating because of the quality of
his work.

"Prestige accrues to those with fancy job titles -- not necessarily to
those who do good work. This morning my garbage was picked up. Quietly, and
on time. It's wonderful. People who do that deserve credit and thanks. But
they don't even get much respect."

'Occupationism'

When Krumboltz accepted the Leona Tyler Award last fall, he aroused some
controversy among colleagues by calling attention to "occupationism" -- a
form of discrimination he finds just as bad as sexism, racism, or ageism.

"They are all forms of judging individuals on the basis of their
membership in a group," he said.

"What's the harm of occupationism? The harm is that people are often
dissuaded from going into occupations in which they would be quite successful
and happy because these occupations are not ranked high enough in the
prestige hierarchy.

"A classic case is the occupation of teacher. I remember well the snide
comments that were made in undergraduate school about those members of our
class who were planning to be teachers. . . . But good teachers make
immensely important contributions to our society.

"We need to launch a campaign to make occupationism as unpalatable as
sexism and racism. Only then will we be able to help people find work
activities that are enjoyable and, at the same time, enable them to retain
the respect of their families and friends."

Krumboltz points out that, in our society, not even those in "acceptable"
professions are immune to the craving for prestige.

He recalls a friend and counselor confiding his own sense of failure.

"He was a great counselor," Krumboltz said. However, over lunch, I learned
how unhappy he was. He envied a colleague who had his name in the paper. He
wanted to be sought out nationally for his opinions and advice. I told him
'Yes, but there are people lining up outside your door to consult with you.'

"Two months later, he died of a heart attack. Six hundred people came to
his funeral. You should have heard the testimonials -- people described how
much they loved him, how much he had helped them. They had no idea he
considered himself a failure."

-cp-

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